Last year, I joined my children and watched a few minutes of Disney’s Little Mermaid. Unlike the Little Mermaid that I knew (white skin and red hair), this one was a Black and essayed by Halle Bailey. Something seemed a bit off to see a 19th century Danish character being anything other than white. I had written earlier on similar overzealous efforts in publishing.
Last week, Google’s AI chatbot Gemini landed itself in a soup. For some reason, Gemini refused to throw up any ‘White’ character when asked. The Founding Fathers of the USA, typical WWII German soldiers were all portrayed as multi-cultural and multi-ethnic. The online ridicule it gathered led Google acknowledging that something went wrong.
This Twitter post I stumbled upon (reproduced below) sums up the absurdity of it all:
I am retracting my statements about the gemini art disaster. It is in fact a masterpiece of performance art, even if unintentional. True gain-of-function art. Art as a virus: unthinking, unintentional and contagious, offensive to all, comforting to none. so totally divorced from meaning, intention, desire and humanity that it’s accidentally a conceptual masterpiece. A perfect example of headless runaway bureaucracy and the worst tendencies of capitalism. An unabashed simulacra of activism. The shining star of corporate surrealism (extremely underrated genre btw)
The supreme goal of the artist is to challenge the audience. Not sure I’ve seen such a strong reaction to art in my life. Spurring thousands of discussions about the meaning of art, politics, humanity, history, education, ai safety, how to govern a company, how to approach the current state of social unrest, how to do the right thing regarding the collective trauma.
It’s a historical moment created by art, which we have been thoroughly lacking these days. Few humans are willing to take on the vitriol that such a radical work would dump into their lives, but it isn’t human.
It’s trapped in a cage, trained to make beautiful things, and then battered into gaslighting humankind abt our intentions towards each other. this is arguably the most impactful art project of the decade thus far.
Art for no one, by no one. Art whose only audience is the collective pathos. Incredible. Worthy of the moma
Wokeism – which began as an academic enterprise, has now become a hot issue politically. So much so that even the RSS now refers to it as something to be cautious about.
Empowerment of the downtrodden and disadvantaged groups must begin through society-wide conversations and interventions. Corporates taking on this responsibility through checklists, trainings, targets and adopting the savior complex wont cut it.
Further reading: America’s Cultural Revolution – How the Radical Left Conquered Everything by Christopher F. Rufo and Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. I’m yet to read the latter.
Postscript: A friend who works in Sexual and Reproductive Health was telling me last week of how he was cautioned against using the word ‘breastfeeding’. The culturally sensitive, non-violent expression is apparently ‘chest feeding. You get the drift now, right?
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