The exhibition by the Whitney Museum of American Art of a painting of the lynched Emmett Till by a white woman artist in its Biennial survey exhibition in 2017 caused a controversy that went to the heart of the contemporary art world in the United States. There was a demand made by a group, writing on behalf of artists of color that the painting be removed and destroyed. That demand gave birth to an intensive and very public conversation among important (...) critics, members of academia, and artists. What is the role of identity in art creation and exhibition? Implicitly, what is the role of gatekeepers who can influence the direction of the art market through promoting the work of some artists and not others? What are the obligations of major institutions in shaping public opinion? I seek to test the public responses to the painting and its challengers against what can be seen with sustained observation in the painting itself. Do the issues inhere in the painting or was the painting captured for an external conversation? I hope that this is an example of what evidence that kind of observation can provide—a matter of interest not just in the discourses of art but also of evidence in the context of the law. (shrink)

Anthropomorphic language is constantly deployed in discussions of technology more generally and very specifically in discussions of artificial intelligence. Such language can obscure both what the technology actually does and what the challenges are to using it. Facial Recognition and autonomous vehicles both rely on a form of computer vision—not the same but related forms. This article seeks to deconstruct what is going on in these two technologies to give readers an ability to think critically about them as these are (...) technologies that will have broad social impacts and which are potentially dangerous to health and well-being. They will involve exercise of power by inscrutable algorithmic authority and it is important to think more deeply about them so that we can build a world we want to live in. (shrink)