Deepfakes graduated from a looming threat to something an enterprising teenager can put together for a TikTok, and chatbots are occasionally sending their creators into crisis. - New York Magazine
The totem poles in Ketchikan represent the ancestral traditions of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people. The Ketchikan Museum’s collection at the Totem Heritage Center alone has more than 30 poles from the 19th century, relocated from the original villages in which they were found. - Smithsonian
Owning a disputed, possibly wildly valuable, art work is a cruel test of any person’s aesthetic values, basic reason, and innate (often well-disguised) capacity for greed. Close your eyes and there are millions of dollars hanging on the wall. Open them, and there is nothing to see. - The New Yorker
The German capital's ethnological museum has started displaying videos or modern copies of the works it has returned to the countries from which they were taken during the colonial era. Is that enough? Or is it just whitewashing? - The Guardian
"Salman al-Nabahin unearthed the mosaic pavement, thought to date from the fifth to the seventh century AD, six months ago while working in his olive orchard in Bureij refugee camp, about half a mile from the border with Israel." - Reuters
Any matches in the results mean that the image could have potentially been used to train AI image generators and might still be used to train tomorrow's image synthesis models. AI artists can also use the results to guide more accurate prompts. - ArsTechnica
The development means there is increased competition for photographers on what were traditionally called photography stock websites, but might be now better described as something else. - PetaPixel
Clément Chéroux arrived just two years ago, and during his time MoMA "was closed for the coronavirus pandemic and its programming was disrupted." He's leaving to direct the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris. - The New York Times
In 1975, Penny Wolin took photos of everything at the St. Francis residential hotel, "from an American man in his 70s and his new French-born girlfriend, to the empty room that had belonged to a stuntman until he died the night before Wolin was due to photograph him." - NPR
"The new report by the Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) identified 108 medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries in Nakhichevan that were completely destroyed between 1997 and 2011 — an eradication." - Hyperallergic
Shocker: Ninety-one percent of emoji users "like to employ them to 'lighten the mood of a conversation.' ... The presence of a little smiley face helps soften our tenth request that someone take out the trash that’s been sitting by the front door for two days 😉." - Hyperallergic
The artists believed factories were the future. "Diagonal lines hint at stained glass—and at the notion, widespread at the time, ... that industrial structures were the cathedrals of the machine age." - The Millions
Fly into Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second and most charming city, and vast empty patches scar the landscape. Most of its southern districts and much of its centre have gone. - The Economist
Poland will formally ask Russia to return seven paintings now in a leading Moscow museum that were looted during World War II by the Soviet Red Army, the Polish culture minister said Wednesday. - AP
In the mid-1930s, Mussolini's minister of agriculture(!), Edmondo Rossoni, worked to turn his home village, marooned in the marshes of Emilia-Romagna, into a model town that could be replicated across Italy. "In Tresigallo, Rossoni envisaged a utopia based around people, with everything geared towards improving their lives." - Atlas Obscura
