Another unusual ingredient found in Rembrandt painting // Facial recognition solves art mystery // Institutions illegally holding Indigenous remains // Corecore = Dada?

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Buy Amara. This is a weekly news show where I discuss contemporary events in the art and history fields.

I'm your host and personal curator, Amara Andrew. The format for the show that I typically follow, but I kind of don't really follow, is one traditionally used by Western brides: something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. This week, we're going to be talking about yet another mystery ingredient that's found in Rembrandt's "Night Watch,"

How facial recognition is solving art history mysteries, how the US government is illegally holding human remains, and what the hell is corecore and why are people saying it's the new Dada? All that and more coming up on this episode of Buy Amara. Let's get to it.

So first, I'm going to start the show off with some ads. Just one ad. I don't know why I said two ads.

I don't know why I made it plural. Just one ad.

Full transparency, this is a business that I actually co-founded with my partner, Jeff, who has been on the podcast before. Are you looking for a way to make your long-form YouTube videos more engaging and shareable? Look no further than Vert.video.

Our platform allows you to take your existing video podcasts and easily edit them down into shorter, more digestible clips that are perfect for social media, email campaigns, and a lot more. With Vert.video, you can keep your audience engaged and coming back for more week after week.

That's v-e-r-t.v-i-d-e-o. Go to vert.video, which is linked in the description below, to make a difference in your content strategy. Now onto the show.

So, I'm starting with like updates/something old. It's kind of weird. This story is like in the middle of being an update and in the middle of being something old, so I just kind of lumped it all in one, so I don't know how I'm going to do the graphics for this, but we shall see.

So in episode one, which was the baby episode, the first episode, oh, also,

Happy episode 20! Thanks to those of you who have been around since whenever you have started listening to me blab on and on about things. I cannot believe that this is episode 20.

It is ridiculous to me that I've been doing this for that long. Technically, I've been doing it for 21 weeks, but I took a week off for vacation and stuff, so, anywho,

We have made it 20 weeks. Woohoo! Like I was saying, back in episode one, I talked about a strange and unusual ingredient that was found in Rembrandt's painting "Night Watch," which go check it out.

It was really weird. I did not expect to hear that this was the ingredient in a famous painting like this. But you make do with what you have, I guess.

So, another super strange element was found in "Night Watch."

The researchers who have been working on restoring this massive painting—it's a whole project, I'll talk about that in a second—they found a chemical called lead formate, which apparently has never been found on a historic painting before. However, in 2020, lead formates were actually found in an independent study that was done, but these were found in freshly painted mockups and not original artworks.

Really quickly,

Lead formate, just to let you know, it's a corrosion product that forms on lead that's been exposed to formic acid or formaldehyde. So in the case of "Night Watch" by Rembrandt, the lead actually probably came from the painting that Rembrandt used, but then the formic acid or the formaldehyde likely came from like paint thinners or strippers that were used in previous conservation and restoration work on the piece.

So why the hell do we even need to know about lead formates in this piece? The larger project, like I teased, is called Project Night Watch, and the researchers that are on this project, it's through the Rijksmuseum, of course, because that's where the painting is. They believe that like the entire project itself will kind of tell us about Rembrandt's painting process and style and everything, and how he used pigments and things, and different chemicals or whatever to make his artwork, which is just fascinating to know.

And it also helps scientists understand the potential reactions between paints and varnishes. This will also help us be able to preserve artworks a lot better, because if you don't know what happened to a painting in the past, you're not going to know what you're using today, how that's going to react with what was done in the past, because it was like the Wild West back then.

Like you could just kind of use whatever without really thinking as much about like, oh, how is this chemical compound going to react with this one, and vice versa, and all that kind of stuff. So this will just help conservation, not only now, but also in the future.

And this isn't to say that the painting itself is in bad shape. It's just to prevent any further damage in the future, which is very helpful. I do want to point out though, that lead formates can, in fact, actually damage a painting, so it's best to know how this works and why, so then a proper treatment plan can be identified for this work.

When I was reading this story, I was thinking about when I worked as an archivist, how vinegar syndrome was something that would just proliferate and could happen. Same with like I think it was ni- nitrate, what is it, nitrate film,

Nitrate film, how that can be volatile and actually like explode or catch fire just because of the disintegration of the film throughout time, which is wild. We would have things like on a separate cart far away from all other collections because then it's like just in case this happens. It was by the offices, which probably wasn't a good idea, so hopefully everybody's okay still.

So, it just reminded me of that, how I mean vinegar syndrome is very different because it can actually hop from a collection in a box to another one.

So, you have to be very careful if you open a box and it smells like vinegar, hence the name. Then it's like, oh, okay, I have to like quarantine this box away from the rest of all the collection, so anyway, blah, blah, blah. Every historic thing is going to have something, you can quote me if you'd like.

So, I just thought this was very interesting. There's a lot of Rembrandt news coming out, obviously, because it's the entire premise of this project, so there might be more to come in the future.

So with AI technology, there's been a lot of debate about the future of creative fields and creativity and the human condition, I suppose, and just a lot of discussion about that and the security of future jobs and things like that, and like discussing the merits of technology within the creative field. There is a bright side, though.

There has been one amazing innovative—I almost said innovative, I've been watching a lot of British TV. One amazing innovative use of technology in art recently, though:

Facial recognition software. Researchers from the University of Nottingham and the University of Bradford recently used facial recognition technology to identify the mystery author of a painting in their collection. The painting known as the "de Brécy Tondo" depicts a typical scene in Western European Renaissance art, which has the Madonna Christ child.

They are the primary focal point. In an analysis of the facial features of both the Madonna and the child within the painting,

Researchers found that the facial features of the Madonna were 97% similar, as well as the facial features of the child were 86% similar to the work of Raphael. That's pretty cool. Researchers specifically used Raphael's altarpiece "Sistine Madonna" in order to really like do a full, comprehensive analysis of the different facial features.

I thought that was so freaking cool, I don't know why, I just I've never thought of like, "Oh, yeah, use facial recognition software to see if this is actually by Jacques-Louis David."

This can get complicated, though, because knowing how artists' studios have functioned throughout history, like in the Renaissance, like particularly just talking about that because this is Raphael, there was the artist who was like the head of the studio who did most of the work, but then also they had like people who worked under them, so like contractors essentially, is how you could think about them.

Those artists would do a large portion of the painting, and then like Raphael, for instance, could come in and do the rest of the work.

So, that's why it would make sense that it wasn't a 100% similar, and also, things are just going to change, artist styles are going to change as well throughout the entire time of their creation of artworks and things. So, the person isn't going to necessarily have the same exact brushstrokes, I mean, they could have learned something else from another artist and then they incorporate that into their piece, so anyway, that I think is why it wasn't 100% like same, exactly, and like coloring and things like that, I mean, I don't know.

To further support that this piece was created by Raphael,

In 2004, molecular analysis on the pigments used in the painting were typical of the early pre-1700 Western European Renaissance period. While the future of technology in the art world and in the creative spaces can seem very scary, I think that it should also be looked at as, you know, this is going to be innovation, or this is going to create new jobs, because if you think about 100 years ago, some of those jobs don't exist anymore.

I mean, the job of even just an art historian specifically has changed drastically in 100 years, like maybe not drastically, but it has changed a lot.

It has a very different methodology, and there are just a lot of different tools that are used today that necessarily weren't used 100 years ago, I mean, if you think about it that way. And also just think about most jobs in general. Jobs that existed in 1923 are just very, very different from how they are today.

So I mean, the entire landscape has shifted, so TL;DR, I guess, if you're in the creative field, don't be afraid. This is just time for you to pivot and change and figure out, "Okay, maybe I'll be a facial recognition software tech or something in the future of paintings versus being, maybe, I don't know, a preparator." I don't know.

There could be a whole variety of things, so just don't be freaked out. It's just a sign that times are changing, so we got to keep up with them. Also, that would be a freaking sweet futuristic job, just saying.

Several museums, universities, and government agencies across the US hold the remains of Indigenous people in their permanent collections more than three decades after a United States law was passed requiring their return. This is a very terrible, terrible story. It's very important to know.

I was debating how I wanted to talk about this just because it's something that definitely elicits a very emotional response for me, so I'm trying to just report the facts and figures, and just keep it, keep it as the story is, so just I guess wanted to throw that out there ahead of time.

For some backstory, the looting and stealing of Indigenous people's bodies, whether from battlefields or from like ancient burial sites and sacred sites and things, that has started centuries ago, but it really proliferated in the 19th and 20th centuries with ethnological or ethnographic studies. I do also want to point out, though, at the start of this, this isn't just specific to Indigenous peoples, but that is primarily what I'm going to be talking about in this segment of the show.

It also has happened to the bodies of enslaved African Americans.

Harvard, for example, I just want to throw this stat out there, they have remains of Black bodies, specifically a large collection of skulls, because like I said, this was during ethnological studies. So, specifically, like I said, I'm focusing on the Indigenous remains in institutions, but I just wanted to let you know that this also applies to Black bodies, so they should not be forgotten.

In 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, so NAGPRA, that's how I'm going to probably refer to it for the rest of this, just because that's a very long title. So in 1990, NAGPRA was passed,

And this act was to force institutions in the United States that were backed by government funding, specifically, that's very important for you to know, so it was to force these US institutions to review their collections for remains and to initiate returns to the respective communities. You'd think that this would be pretty quick and shut, and like open-shut kind of thing, you'd think that this would be very like, "Okay, sure, no problem.

Like let's get started." No, of course not.

Which is why we're talking about it right now. I thought that this was really interesting. I was going to say silly, but this is just ridiculous.

It was estimated that it would only take 10 years, so from 1990 to 2000 for this entire initiative to be finished and completed. It's almost I mean, the act is older than I am. It's taken this freaking long for this to happen, and it's still not complete.

Current estimates have actually said that this might take another 70 years for institutions to be returning these remains, but time will tell.

So, this is how I found out about this. So, through their Repatriation Project, ProPublica, Publica, in conjunction with NBC News discovered that several US institutions still held Indigenous remains in their collection. 10 institutions though, in particular, held more than half of the remains that are still in collections.

It's not shocking in a way that it's like, "Oh my god, I'm so surprised," but it's just shocking seeing that this exists and this is happening.

Two of the 10, so two institutions of the 10, are direct arms of the United States government. One is the Interior Department, and then the other is the Tennessee Valley Authority. A spokesperson for the Interior Department went on record to say that they comply with their legal obligations and are not required to begin the repatriation of culturally unidentifiable human remains unless a tribe or Indigenous organization makes a formal request.

That phrase, "culturally unidentifiable human remains," is the primary issue here in this entire huge issue.

So through the Repatriation Project, it was found that some institutions like the Interior Department, like they just said, and then also the Tennessee Valley Authority, they used a legal loophole and classified the remains in their care as culturally unidentifiable so then they could indefinitely stall their return. The Repatriation Project has a database that cataloged an estimated 100,000 Indigenous people's remains that, like I said, are in a wide variety of collections across the United States.

There are about 200 institutions that have the remains of 14,000 people and they haven't returned any of them, they haven't even tried to start the process of returning people. Some of these institutions can have like one set of human remains, one individual person. Others have a couple thousand.

There are also a lot of prestigious institutions. Like I said, I'm not shocked or surprised, but I am just disgusted, I guess, is the proper term.

There are very prestigious institutions that have Indigenous remains within their collections, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and the Field Museum here in Chicago. The Field Museum is a whole clusterfuck of an institution. I have never wanted to work there, I have hated that place since day one, they've done very terrible things throughout, it started in 1893 at the World's Exposition,

That also, just, this could go on and on and on. But essentially, I was very not surprised to see the Field Museum, that was probably the least shocking part of this because they have a lot of wild things in their collection that they really should not have. Back to the story, I'm trying to keep this, I'm trying to keep this very news-centric instead of an emotional response from me, but it's very difficult, I just want to put that out there.

Each of the institutions that I previously listed, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and the Field Museum,

Each institution holds the remains of more than 1,000 people. UC Berkeley though, has 9,000 remains. That is like, I did quick math in my head, that's like a third of the population of the town I grew up in Arizona.

That just blows my mind. I couldn't even name nine, that is so many people, that's so many people's remains.

And I know some people in the comments are going to say, "Who cares? Whatever, it doesn't matter." It really does matter, it is a an immoral issue where if this act, also, if this act was filed and passed in 1990, what the hell is the hold up? Like, there's absolutely no reason why you should still have these.

You could either give them back to the like give them back to the communities first and foremost, or have a separate burial, like a an honoring of the bodies and a separate burial process,

I don't I don't know what to call it, but a ceremony of sorts to then lay these remains to rest. Like there are a couple different options, it's not, "Oh, we'll just stick them in the closet and keep them there forever." Like there's absolutely no reason why this should exist, so save your comments for yourself, I don't want to hear it.

And I do just want to end the story on maybe a more positive note because this is very sad and very terrible, and I'm so sorry to the communities that have to deal with this, especially because Indigenous communities are trying to work with

These institutions, and the institutions are essentially like, "No, good luck. You're on your own." like I said, I do want to end on a more positive sort of note, I always try to find the positive. So in October of 2022, the Biden administration proposed regulations that would eliminate the phrase "culturally unidentifiable" as a designation for human remains, so this should actually help speed the process along and actually have institutions have nothing to hide behind.

The institutions having these things could be a power play by them, and that is not cool at all. That would make sense though why this has still happened to this day. In light of this article and a series of articles being written about this though, some institutions have begun working with Indigenous tribe representatives to figure out how to return the remains, so that is awesome, that is cool, I'm glad it started, it's way fucking overdue, 33 years overdue,

And I do just, again, want to say that this isn't specifically just for Indigenous communities, it's also enslaved African American remains as well in institutions, so raise hell, I guess, is what I'm where I'm trying to go with this. Hopefully museums and institutions can take a look and as we get young professionals in the museums and everything, then hopefully more forward-thinking people, not just young, I don't equate young with forward-thinking, but hopefully we can get more forward-thinking people in these institutions to be able to start these processes and get things rolling and re- like re- remove and give back things that shouldn't be in museum collections.

So, that's where I'm going to end the story. Let's go onto the next one.

Okay, so I did switch up the order a little bit of how I normally talk about things, because I wanted to end on a little bit more of a positive note, I guess. It's kind of positive, but kind of not. It's said that history repeats itself, and it actually kind of does in a way.

There's a new trend on TikTok called corecore, C-O-R-E C-O-R-E smushed together, so it's corecore, and you can look it up using the hashtag corecore in TikTok. This movement has been compared to a different movement that happened over 100 years ago in Western Europe called Dada.

If you've taken any art history classes, even just like Art History 101, you've definitely heard of Dada. It's it's hard for me to like boil it down into one small synthesis, so this is just my I'm doing my best here. Dada was trying to early Dada, I should say, was trying to dismantle these ideas of societal norms and what is normal in a society.

Why do we do these things? What are these rituals that we partake in that we haven't even like looked at, and like why do we do these things that we do and what's happening in the world? Dada worked to dismantle these traditional ideas and cultural things and social sociological ideologies and things.

And this was done through the use of like nonsense words, nonsense poems, nonsense Everything was just nonsense, and just making fun of things, but also showing the overstimulation and just Google Dada and you'll find out, I could talk on and on. I love Dada. I am so fascinated by it as an art movement, so, which is why I was very curious to hear about the similarities and differences between corecore and Dada.

Dada also even like tried to dismantle religion, which Hugo Ball, he may have been an antisemite, I just found out, which I'm very upset about, but separate thing,

But Hugo Ball actually would dress up like the Pope kind of, it was like a robot kind of looking Pope, I'll have a photo up here for you. He would recite "Gadji beri bimba," which is a nonsense kind of poem, and that was the whole thing about Dada, was just everything is just ridiculous and made up, which makes sense, because when you're in a World War I world, everything just feels so fake and made up, and just weird, and you look at things and you're like, "Why the hell do we do these things?

Why do we listen to this weird old man dressed in a robe and a funny hat recite these ridiculous

Words?" I'm sorry if you're religious, I am not, clearly, so I think it's all just absolutely ridiculous, but it's just deconstructing all these weird rituals that we're in that we don't necessarily question. So anyway, so going back to corecore, I said I wouldn't go down the road too far, but here I am. So corecore is surprisingly very similar, but it's a very different look at the world.

So while I was trying to look through corecore videos to figure out what it is, but that's like kind of the beauty of it is you don't really know, but here's kind of what I was able to sort of figure out. So, Dada and corecore both are dealing with,

I mean, both are obviously like very similar. Dada, corecore, it's like the repetition of the words and the letters and everything, that's how words work, they're made of letters. They're both reactions to anxieties, so like I said, Dada, World War I, shit's getting weird, everything is blowing up, it's just that's a whole history topic in and of itself, I'm trying to give you the Cliff's Notes versions of it, but Dada is mainly dealing with anxiety and how do we respond to this, and why are we doing anything like this?

Corecore is also dealing with anxieties, however, this is like a moder- a post-modernist Dada, I guess I would call it.

This is a way of people dealing with the anxieties caused by the pandemic, how we're all restructuring our culture, our outlooks on things, so like I just discussed in the previous story about institutions looking at their collections and being like, "What the hell is this, and why do we have this?" We're in a new era of things breaking down and dismantling so then they can be built back up, so it's not bad, it's not inherently evil or anything like that, it's actually helpful, but it's still it's something new, which is terrifying in our human psychology.

Anything new can be very scary, it can also be very exciting, though.

The corecore videos are I should just tell you what the hell corecore is, sorry, I keep going down on these tangents. Corecore videos, they're typically like a minute long, maybe, or like 30 seconds or something, and it's just a very quick, rough chop of various different videos put together, so it's almost like Dada collage.

Collage is just like where you have one main composition, but then it's made of a bunch of different images to have it look chaotic, and it's just a bunch going on. That's kind of like what these videos are, which is really fascinating. They are dealing a lot with looking at like fights online, how people are recording fights,

Influencers trying to sell you things, just like the fake culture of what being an influencer is, and selling and consumerism, and they're also looking at like deconstructing these notions of consumerism and capitalism and technology, and surveillance, also, was something that I noticed as well, with especially looking at like the fight videos that were spliced into these larger narratives, it's like it's like Barbara Kruger meets Dada.

It's very interesting and again, like I said, it is very post-modern.

I also kind of read into this that this is like the overstimulation in the digital age, so being able to constantly know what everybody in the world is thinking, feeling, saying, doing, at any time. I could literally go on my phone right now and see what people far, far away from me are doing today, which is just not natural, it's not normal, it is very weird.

Like, we shouldn't I'm going to go on a whole other tangent, but we shouldn't know any of this stuff about anybody. I shouldn't know what you had for breakfast, just like you shouldn't know what I was doing last night or whatever. That sounds really sketchy, that's not what I meant at all.

But it's just weird, like we shouldn't know any of this about each other, yet we know it all the time. However, it's just like the Instagram versus reality, where we're not actually seeing people's reality, we're seeing the highlight reel, the made-up version of people's lives. So, that's what corecore is looking at, and it's looking at deconstructing this beauty and looking at it when you look at the videos and you see everything in like one- to two-second chops all like clips all smushed together, it's really alarming and disturbing to see.

I'm guilty of it. I like looking at those aesthetic get ready with me videos, like I enjoy it because I find it soothing. When you see it like that, though, it's like, "What is wrong with me?

Why am I looking at this and why do I derive pleasure from seeing this?" It's so fabricated, it's so false, it's so not real life, but it's also the escapism, so we get to escape our real life. Even no matter how good your life is, you always want to have some sort of an escape, I always say that, and you might think I'm wrong, which that's totally fine, you can have your opinion as well.

I do think though, we all have that little bit of escapism, and that's kind of what corecore is like, "Hey,

Why are you spending all your time and money looking at this stupid shit and buying whatever nancy whatever the influencers selling you? Like you don't need it. We have way too much time on our hands, we have like free time now, we have way too much available money to spend on things, or people don't and then they're just in debt." So anyway, going down another tangent.

So, all that to say, I'm going to end the story right now. But all that to say, it's just fascinating to see how history can repeat itself, but it's definitely a very different method of it, and it's it's

I do agree, I do think that this is very post-modernist Dada. It's not as prolific, and it's not as varied of an artistic form yet, but I mean maybe it could. I haven't really looked at modernist like current what is being produced today in the art world, I haven't looked at how that could relate to corecore, so maybe that would be something I study in the future.

So, anyway, that was a very wild episode of Buy Amara, so thank you so much for listening. If you like this episode, please make sure you like it and subscribe.

That helps me, and I really appreciate it, so thank you so much to those of you also who have been liking and subscribing and supporting me, and I still also, I have a Patreon if you want to support there. No pressure at all, just want to let you know, I guess. And yeah, so I'm Amara Andrew.

Never stop creating.