A chef spots a mistake in a van Gogh painting!

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Viamara. This is going to be a different show now.

Still the same show, but bear with me. I have a brand new intro and sort of a different premise. So let me just get into it.

This is a weekly news show where we'll look at some of the weird, strange, and just downright odd things that have happened in the art and history fields. I'm your host and personal curator, Amara Andrew. This week, we're talking about reading a thousand ancient scrolls to make $700,000, a blue crayon, sculpture's nemesis, how a chef spotted a mistake in a van Gogh painting, and how an AI image won a prestigious photography award.

So we have all that and more coming up on this episode of Viamara. So let's get to it.

So that intro took a lot longer than normal. I realized that every week I was saying the format for this show is something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. And then I was like, "It really isn't anymore.

I'm just kind of picking and choosing." And I realized the common thread in everything that I was choosing was weird things, for the most part, that have happened this week. So I am revamping Viamara to be a weekly news show where we'll look at just kind of weird sort of things that pop up.

Sometimes there will be things where I'm just like, "I really want to talk about this." But for the most part, that is going to be the general format of this. So anything unusual that has happened in the art and history fields, we are talking about it on this show. So I hope you enjoy.

You will not have to hear me say every single week, "This is a show where it's something old, something red, blue, purple, whatever." I will not be saying that anymore. I probably will next week, though, because I'll probably forget.

However, we will see what happens. So anyway, updates: I don't have any related to any of the stories that I've discussed. However, we are going to Arazona.

That's what Jeff and I call it. But we're going back to my homeland, and it is going to be this week, actually today when this comes out. Very excited.

I haven't seen some of the people that I'm going to see in a very long time. So I'm very excited. It's for my best friend from high school, her bachelorette party.

And it'll be great.

I know Scottsdale, the area where I'm from, and like Fountain Hills and stuff, I know it's changed drastically. So I can't wait to see it. Jeff, my boyfriend and live-in lover, he has never been to Arizona, so I'm very excited to show him all of my stuff.

I'm going to be like such an old fart where I'm just like, "Back in my day, we went over there, and we did this." And I don't know, I'm just very excited to show him. So that should be fun. I will see what happens.

Other than that, I don't really have any sort of like personal life updates. I'm trying to think what the fuck I've been doing. Just a lot of work.

I've been spending a lot of time with my clients lately, too, which is very lovely. Like going out to dinner and going to get drinks. Blah.

It's been really great just hanging out with clients and just getting to know like everybody on a personal level. I don't know, I think that's so important when you are running a business and just like, I don't know, just to be friends with people. I just I really like being friends with people, so.

Anyway, I believe that's it for updates. So let's just get straight into the stories.

For some reason when I was reading about this, I didn't really find a lot of new stories about it, so this is all just from the actual website. But when I was reading it, I was thinking that this sounded like a Bond supervillain sort of story, and I don't know why. There's just like a vibe to it, and I don't know.

I said it to Jeff, actually, right before I started recording, and he's like, "Really?" And I was like, "Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what it is." And it doesn't seem as nefarious as I'm building it up to be, but it's it there was just like a vibe. I don't know.

I think I'm in my mind.

Let me know in the comments and whatever, tweet at me or whatever if you are on the same page or if you think I'm totally out of my gourd. Anywho, would you like to use your passion for history and science to make a cool $700,000? Then the Vesuvius Challenge might be for you.

This challenge was created by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, investor Daniel Gross, and Dr. Brent Seales as a way to read a series of ancient scrolls that were found at Herculaneum.

A brief history to these scrolls and to Herculaneum in case you have no idea what I'm talking about. The scrolls in question are from Herculaneum. Herculaneum was the city alongside Pompeii that was buried with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

So, just totally covered, gone. So, Herculaneum was accidentally rediscovered in 1709, and then there was just a lot of excavation work that was happening because of this. In 1750, so about 40-ish years after that,

A tunnel that reached the Villa of the Papyri, dozens of bronze and marble sculptures were found inside. People kept digging in this tunnel for the next two years until they found what looks like lumps of charcoal. You can guess from the way that I just said that, these weren't lumps of charcoal.

These were scrolls. These were the papyrus scrolls in question that had been carbonized because of the volcanic eruption. For the next two years, about 1,000 scrolls were found, a lot of them just in various

Bits and pieces, so you didn't have an entire scroll. And also since then, well, not since then, but scholars now believe that there are even thousands more that are over there that need to be brought up from the ground or excavated. People have been very curious what is written on these scrolls for centuries since they were found.

There have even been some ridiculous attempts to read them, including—and I say ridiculous from this vantage point in this time period, but at the time I'm sure it was probably like, "Yeah, sure."

We're a little bit more conservation and preservation friendly nowadays. But some of these attempts included chopping the scrolls in half lengthways and peeling back the layers from the inside, which is like, oh my god, dousing them in chemicals, blasting them with gas, pulverizing them, etc. As I was reading each one, I just felt myself getting sadder and sadder and sicker and sicker.

I was like, "Not the scrolls, please!"

I'm so about preserving things, which is hilarious because I love throwing away my own things. Like, I love Not even throwing away, but I love getting rid of things. I am such a minimalist as you can probably tell from our home, and I wear the same like three shirts all the time.

But I was reading this and I was like, "No, no, no, no, no. We must save the history." But the reason why people have been so hell-bent on reading what is in these scrolls is because I think I read like 99% of

Ancient Greco-Roman texts are gone. We only have about 1% left to tell us about this entire span of thousands of years of history. So, in these scrolls, it's believed that we can glean some information about ancient Greco ancient Greco-Roman life, including philosophy, science, literature, mathematics, poetry, and politics, which is why nerds like me would love to read them.

So, back to the Vesuvius Challenge, though. So, that's a little bit of back story about why

This is kind of happening. So in 2015, Dr. Seales, who I mentioned before is one of the co-founders of this initiative or of this challenge, Dr.

Seales is from the University of Kentucky, and he used X-ray tomography and computer vision to read the En-Gedi scroll without opening it. And the En-Gedi scroll was discovered in the Dead Sea, and it was found to contain text from the Book of Leviticus. Because of this, it's now been proven that virtual unwrapping can be successful.

Obviously, as you can tell where this is going, he has tried to read the Herculaneum papyri. But these have been proven way more challenging to read. Unlike the En-Gedi scroll, which has denser inks, the Herculaneum ink is carbon-based, which doesn't allow X-ray contrast against the underlying carbon-based papyrus.

The ink used in the Herculaneum scrolls is radiolucent, making it difficult to see in the scans. Recently, though, his team has trained a machine learning model, which can detect

The ink from subtle patterns in the 3D X-rays. This works in the fragments, but these models are not yet perfect and will probably need to be improved to work at the scale of an entire scroll. On their website, they provide 8-micrometer 3D X-ray scans of each of these scrolls.

And your job, if you choose to accept it, is to extract the extract the text from these scans.

They say that you can also approach this challenge through any means necessary: machine learning, computer vision, machine-assisted tools operated by my by my humans by humans. You can do essentially whatever you would like. So, kind of one of the questions I had, too, was like, how did this even start?

What's like the objective of this? Like, okay, cool. What do you do?

On their website, they state that, quote, "The objective of the Vesuvius Challenge is to make history by reading an unopened Herculaneum scroll for the very first time.

We believe that an open competition will accelerate progress and enable us to achieve this goal in 2023." And then in their FAQ section, why did you decide to start this project? It's written that Nat, who's one of the main founders of this, read 24 Hours in Ancient Rome during the 2020 COVID lockdown. He fell into an internet rabbit hole that ended up with him reaching out to Dr.

Seales two years later to see how he could help speed up the reading of the Herculaneum papyri.

They came up with the idea of the Vesuvius Challenge. Daniel, who is another he's like an investor, Daniel was intrigued by this idea and decided to co-sponsor it with Nat. So Dr.

Seales is not fronting any money for this, just FYI. So, what are the prizes? Well, the grand prize, like I said, is $700,000.

There are various different tiers of prizes on the website, so you can go take a look. There are also a bunch of different deadlines. I think most of them have passed,

Except the grand prize is in effect until December 31st, 2023. So you still have a few months to get to it if you'd like. The grand prize will be awarded to the first team to read a scroll.

The stipulations include that the review team can, quote, "read at least four separate passages of continuous and plausible text from the scrolls, each at least 140 characters long,

And then in each passage at most 15% of the characters can be missing or illegible, and qualifying submissions reviewed by the team of developers and papyrologists," never said that word before, " will be reviewed for legitimacy and plausibility." So, like I said, a bunch of different prizes, a lot of different things. They have a really great resource section on their website, too, and they provide you with X-rays and things like that, so you can go to their website scrollprize.org to check it out if you're interested.

Not a sponsor. I just really think it's fascinating. So,

If you're interested and you have a keen mind for this kind of work, I don't even know what to call it, there you go. Help yourself. You can make $700,000.

So, for the start of our next story, just some something you should be aware of. Original ancient sculptures weren't actually white or beige like you think that they are. You know, you have like the pristine white marble and things like that.

They were actually painted in very bright, vivid colors. Then throughout 17, 18, 1900s, when people tried to recreate these idea of Greco-Roman beauty and stuff like that, they would make their marbles pure white.

So, which brings me This is a horrible segue, I'm so sorry. So, which brings me to our next story where a mystery culprit might just be a really huge art history buff. That was terrible, I really apologize.

There was a statue depicting the mythical mythological Woah. There was a statue depicting the mythological water nymph Sabrina, and it was defaced by an unknown person who scribbled all over it with blue crayon, and I mean literally all over it. Like, here is a photo if you are watching this, if not go look it up.

Literally everywhere. They even colored the eyes blue, I think. So, the statue was sculpted in 1802 by John Bacon, and it was located at the Croome Court in South Worcestershire, England.

This sculpture was defaced during an Easter event where they had children there, which children already I knew it was going to be a problem. Children were given a pack of crayons, and I bet whoever had that idea really hates their life right now. Can you imagine going to your boss and thinking that you're being a really good like, "Hey, am I going to get a promotion?" or "This might be really fun for the community." And then you have some kid or whoever, maybe even an adult or just a disgruntled museum worker, draw all over a statue with crayon, and it's like, "Oh my god, I was the one that said we should have crayons." I could not I would be so upset.

So in addition to this sculpture, a memorial on the site was also covered in blue crayon. A mild detergent was used to remove the crayon from the statue itself, but

The memorial is proving a little bit trickier to clean. There are still a lot of markings and it's really difficult because I think they also said that there's text where the crayon is stuck in there, so this will just be part of part of the history of these pieces, I guess. It is weird, too, because another work at the Kansas museum, this one, though, was a sculpture of Buddha, someone also defaced it with a blue crayon in 2021.

So, either somebody is moving across the globe, they're going from Kansas to Worcestershire, and they're just taking their little blue crayon and defacing things. I don't know, that's very strange. I think in the case of the Buddha sculpture that it was just the leg, but that's still terrible.

Very quick story, but I just really think and hope that museums will just take all writing implements except for pencil, take them out of your institution. Do not give children crayons near your priceless artifacts. Just do not.

That is a terrible, terrible idea.

For our next story, a chef noticed a mistake when looking at a van Gogh still life at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Chef Ernst de Witte, and apologies if I mispronounce that, was casually looking at van Gogh's Red Cabbages and Onions from 1887 as one is to do, when he noticed something strange.

They weren't actually onions in the piece. They were heads of garlic. That's pretty freaking sweet.

I genuinely don't know if I would have noticed that at all, so kudos to you. After Ernst noticed this, he messaged the museum and was like, "Hey, that's that's garlic. Those aren't onions." And the institution actually took him seriously, which kudos to the museum because I thought this was going to go a totally different way.

So, they took him seriously and they asked him to prove it to them, which I thought was really interesting.

So, Ernst went home, told his wife what happened. They developed a PowerPoint that compared the painting in question, so Red Cabbages and Onions, to another work by Van Gogh that was called Still Life Around a Plate of Onions that was from 1889. So, 1887 was the one that Ernst saw who was like, "That ain't onions, those are garlic." And then compared it to 1889, so 2-year span.

In their PowerPoint, they included an analysis of how Van Gogh handled both onions and garlic in his work.

They also included a video comparing and contrasting different types of garlic and onions by shape and color, and they even mapped out the subtle lines Van Gogh painted to suggest the clove segments under garlic skin. Pretty thorough art historical work, I would say. This is like a thesis, essentially.

This is great. So, after compiling all of their work, they sent it to the museum who then passed it on to their research team. A few months later, after reviewing all these materials,

They determined that he was in fact correct. It's so cool. So, the painting is now called Red Cabbages and Garlic.

I really hope they put this in the provenance for the piece. I mean, they have to. Otherwise, they'll be like, "Why the fuck did the name change in 2022 or three or whatever?" What year is it?

So, it's definitely going to be in the provenance. I actually hope they even put it in the museum label because that would be so cool. And, how cool would that be to be the person to identify that?

I know a lot of different art historians are always trying to do that because then it's like, "Oh, this wasn't by Vermeer," like we talked about,

I don't remember what episode that was. Okay, so yes, it was a Vermeer and it was in episode 5. So in episode 5, we talked about a fake Vermeer painting that was found out at the National Gallery.

Not fake, but you know what I mean. So, that would just be so freaking sweet to be one of those people. I don't know.

Maybe one day I can. I just need to stare at things longer, I guess. So, anyway, the painting is now called Red Cabbages and Garlic, and inspired by this, Ernst, who owns a restaurant, like he's a chef and he owns a restaurant, his restaurant's name is Feu, I believe.

And that he created a dish based on what happened. The dish consists of a poached red cabbage placed over a creme of puffed garlic and drizzled with a vinaigrette of lemon balm, tarragon, and of course, absinthe, which was Van Gogh's favorite drink. I just I am amazed.

I thought that was so fucking cool. I love that he actually did something about it, too, and was like, "That isn't an onion. That's a garlic.

Like, head of garlic. That's a that's a garlic." I like that he actually told them, too, and that they took him seriously and looked at his stuff. Like, that's amazing.

And that he and his wife, like, kudos to them, because that is really cool that they sat down and made a whole PowerPoint. I love it. This is the art historical shit that I absolutely love.

So, anyway, I thought that was really fun. So, let's go to our final story for this week.

So, AI is causing quite a stir in many disciplines and I've talked about this on lots of past episodes of this show, but something I didn't think about were art contests where you submit your work and then people judge it and then you can win a cash prize or just a pat on the back or whatever. So, with advancements in AI, art contests are going to get very, very interesting.

And that is the case of what happened to this artist.

Artist Boris Eldagsen Why'd I say it like that? So, Boris Eldagsen submitted a photograph to the prestigious competition, the World Photography Organisation's Sony World Photography Awards, and he won! Really cool!

Awesome, yay! His piece is titled The Electrician and it looks like an old photograph, maybe like 1930s or so, and it shows two women.

One is in the front, she has like this light-colored, draped, kind of V-neck dress on, and then there's another woman behind her who's like crouching behind her. Actually a little creepy. And she has her right hand on the woman in front of her on her shoulder.

Another hand is coming from nowhere to touch the woman in front's left shoulder. So, kind of a creepy photo, but I don't know, I like it. Besides being slightly creepy, there's another very important aspect to know about this photo, and that it was not actually a photo, it was an AI-generated image.

So, already you can see where the issue is coming in. This image was part of a series Eldagsen made called PSEUDOMNESIA, and it was created by submitting language to an AI generator over and over and over and over again, and creating different versions of these images every time. Boris is very up to date with his art history because he wrote, quote, "Just as photography replaced painting in the reproduction of reality, AI will replace photography.

Don't be afraid of the future. It will just be more obvious that our mind always created the world that makes it suffer," end quote.

And that was directly in relation to a lot of people who are freaking out in the art community or just the creative community saying, "You know, AI is going to replace us." That is a point I want to talk about a little bit later after we get through the rest of this. It is interesting. It's all It is all perspective, but it is interesting.

But, we're going to keep to the story for a second. So when Boris found out that he won the award, he also wrote, quote, "AI images and photography should not compete with each other in an award like this.

They are different entities. AI is not photography. Therefore I will not accept the award." He continued, "We, the photo world, need an open discussion.

A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what is not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter? Or would this be a mistake?" As you can imagine, when he turned down the award to the organization, the World Photography Organisation,

They were really pissed about this and released a scathing statement. They said, and this is long, so apologies, but it's needed for all of this story. So, bear with me.

Quote, "As he has now decided to decline his award, we have suspended our activities with him and in keeping with his wishes, have removed him from the competition. Given his actions and subsequent statement noting his deliberate attempts at misleading us, and therefore invalidating the warranties he provided,

We no longer feel we are able to engage in a meaningful and constructive dialogue with him. We recognize the importance of this subject and its impact on image-making today. We look forward to further exploring this topic via our various channels and programs and welcome the conversation around it.

While elements of AI practices are relevant in artistic contexts of image-making, the awards always have been and will continue to be a platform for championing the excellence and skill of photographers and artists working in the medium." To me, that sounds like they were extremely embarrassed that they picked an AI-generated image to win, and that they're now trying to save their own asses

By not realizing that this was an AI-generated image. I don't know. That was how I read it because it felt needlessly aggressive, unless he was being very aggressive to them, I don't know.

I guess I don't need to inject my opinion into this that much, but I personally take that as they're way overreacting when they could have just been like, "You know, this is part of the problem and use this as a learning moment to teach everybody else like, 'Hey, just FYI, this is what can happen.'" I don't know, it was it was very aggressive.

So, yeah, I just I don't care for their tone.

I had a lot of different questions pop up into my mind while I was reading this. So one of them for you, my dear listener and or viewer, does it matter, and this is something that you can think about, you could comment if you want, or just have a lively discussion with your creative friends. Does it matter if something was created by AI, or does it matter if something was created by a human?

Does that matter to you and why? Like, I think it's a really fascinating question.

To me, it does matter, just because I very much rely on context for a lot of different things, so why did this person use this? Why did this person use that? Why is this?

Why is that? Like, I love context. I am so about context.

It really gets me going and I think it's very important. Personally, for me, I do think that I like human artwork more for now. Again, this is like a brand new thing.

Like, we are all so

Afraid of these new things, and the more I'm learning about AI, the less the less salty I'm getting about it, to be honest. There are still some issues that I have, but it is a very interesting new medium. I could already see this becoming a major at colleges and universities, like art schools around the around the country and globe.

But I do personally prefer human-created art so far, just because, in my mind, it still has a "soul", quote unquote. Not that I necessarily believe in the idea of a soul,

But it just it has I have more of a bond to it, I think. I don't know, I've had so much trouble trying to describe what it is I feel for human art, so I'm not going to really be able to fully describe it, unfortunately, but just knowing Sorry, a little squeak. Just knowing that this came from someone, and they created it out of some sort of feeling, I feel like I can resonate with that more because I have feelings.

Whereas for an AI-generated image,

The AI does not have emotions in the same way that a human does that I know of as of yet. I don't know, I'm not in that field. So, I just I like when things have a human feeling.

Like, I can relate to it in that way, and that's not to say that AI doesn't or can't get there, but just from me, from what I've seen, I don't know, that's that's all I got. So, I just I like I think knowing that this was made by a human, because then it's like, "Oh, okay, like

You felt heartbreak in this moment. I can see that and I can relate to that. You felt anger and passion, and I see that and I feel that." And you could totally have that with an AI-generated image.

I'm not saying you can't, but it's just different to me for now. But I think that's just because I'm not used to it, and that's like my own little like, "No, I want to like feel the human connection" and stuff. So, I was also thinking, too, if we need to have competitions that are specifically like human-made art and AI-generated art, so two very different competitions or something like that.

But then again,

How do you regulate that? How do you know? Like, this It's just a tricky sort of thing.

Or do you have both of them and you have to tell what medium you worked in or whatever, or what type of art it is? I have no idea. It would be very interesting to have like separate photography and then AI-generated art and then painting, kind of like kind of like how you can do now for all the different disciplines.

But just something to ponder for you for the next few days or week or whatever. Anyway,

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy the new format. It is basically exactly the same.

It's just a different premise behind it, so I need to update all my stuff everywhere. Let me know your thoughts and opinions about AI-generated art and kind of if you prefer human-created versus AI art or whatever, and kind of why. I don't know, I just like hearing what other people think about it, because then that could help me kind of maybe realize what I'm trying to say, but anyway, I digress.

So,

Thank you so much for listening. Please like this video if you like it. It really helps with rankings and stuff like that, and subscribe if you like it, also.

Hit the little bell to get notified, cause then it's like ting-a-ling-ling whenever I post anything. And I do clip this podcast up, so you could head over to my YouTube channel, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, and I do have separate clips, so you can find them there if you want just like a little 30 to 60 second summation.

So, anywho, I really appreciate you. I love you. Have a great week, and I'm Amara Andrew.

Never stop creating.