Save face and skip insulting selfie app
It’s art meets state-of-the-art. Google Arts & Culture app recently topped the Apple and Android download charts. Not because we Wi-Fi-connected commoners have suddenly taken an interest in the “collections curated by experts from the most famous museums” and being “moved by stories depicted in thousands of photos, videos, manuscripts and artworks on every type of screen and in virtual reality.”
It’s popular because … selfies! “Is your portrait in a museum? Take a selfie and search thousands of artworks to see if any look like you,” urges the app’s search feature.
We simply snap a fresh photo and then the Google app, using the wizardry of facial recognition, matches us with masterpiece doppelgangers in its database.
All so we can become more enlightened and further our knowledge and appreciation of fine art.
What do you mean I look like the Diego Velazquez painting An Old Woman Cooking Eggs?! Who cares if the year was 1618 and it is part of the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland? Who are you calling old, Google?! (Though, I do nevertheless appreciate the app’s assumption I can cook eggs; they’re admittedly not my specialty.)
This was the result when I posed straight-faced, in clearly unflattering lighting. I don’t have sallow skin and sunken cheeks, like Diego’s Old Woman (do I?). And speak up so I can hear you. And then get off my lawn.
I would try the app about 382 more times in different settings with different expressions. With uncomplimentary and unlikely results.
When I posed with a closedmouth smile, it said my face resembled the visage in Ontwep voor kostuum voor Apollo (whatever that means) by Richard Roland Holst. I was immediately delighted.
Hey, it thinks I’m divinity with angular features!
Wait, Apollo? The sun god? It thinks I’m a man?!
Although at least it didn’t think I was a man with a mustache; bushy lipped Otto Benzon by Christian Krohg is the result a girlfriend got when she took a shadowy selfie without makeup. The same friend also was informed she looked like the Mr. — and not the Mrs. — in Andrea Soldi’s Sir Robert and Lady Smyth With Their Son, Hervey. In fairness, their faces are close, but friend’s curly hair is way cuter than his powdered wig.
We needn’t feel bad. When actress Kate Hudson — yes, the pretty, rich one; celebrities are doing this, too — posted her result, she got a painting by Pierpont Limner: Portrait of a Boy. Her next
role: How to Look Like a Guy in 10 Seconds.
When I posed with a laughy, open-mouth face, I was compared to yet another man in Pieter Aertsen’s Wing of an Altarpiece With Adoration of the Magi . A black man.
My favorite, however, was when I posed with a closedmouth, slightly twisted smile. I was likened to Bartolome Esteban Murillo’s Four Figures on a Step — the figure with a smirky grimace that looks like it’s smelling bad eggs, perhaps cooked by Diego’s Old Woman.
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, the first few for many of us playing with this app are: “Makeover needed, stat!”
Not everyone is “arting” around with the Arts & Culture app. For now, it’s only for use in the United States, and not even all 50 of those; the app is not available in Texas and Illinois. And although Google declined to comment why, it’s likely because of laws restricting usage of biometric data such as facial scans.
Which begins to make this Old Woman rather leery. Perhaps we should be less worried about unfavorable portraits and be more concerned about online privacy.
Now, Google promises it “won’t use data from your photo for any other purpose and will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches.”
Let’s hope. This Old Woman Cooking Eggs has already enough egg on her face thanks to Google.